Million Onion Hotel – Crazy Visuals & Onions

Million Onion Hotel is a nostalgic pixel art game that utilizes a simple tile pattern system disguised behind thousands of crazy visuals and assorted madness.

Million Onion Hotel is an experience not easy to understand. On game start, and indeed for the first ten minutes, the only thing to really think is “What the hell is going on?” There are onions to click on like a whack-a-mole game that the game encourages you to line up in the grid like playing any other tile game.

The key difference between those games and Million Onion Hotel is the sheer, gob-smacking quantity of undulating graphics and shining effects. It is, frankly, insane.

The game is, ultimately, very simplistic. You match the onions that pop up in the five by five grid, clicking on them to pick them and leave behind a slightly purple patch that can then be matched with the rest in the grid to gain extra points. Once you link together five in a row, a bass voice announces in desperate glee “SINGLE” or “DOUBLE” if you’re clever enough to get two rows in one.

Once you link together five in a row, a bass voice announces in desperate glee “SINGLE” or “DOUBLE” if you’re clever enough to get two rows in one.

The game then continues to throw shining effects at you in reward, showing you all the sheer quantity of points gained for picking your illustrious onions.

On picking enough onions, the game goes turns the insanity up to eleven with even more flashing effects and frantic lights. The figures needing to be picked turn to bells that require two clicks, later requiring three clicks, sometimes the things you click on give you extra time – yes, that’s right, this is all timed – and others give you more points.

Sometimes you’ll click on something or do something or other and the game stops, shows an intimate dining room with a couple enjoying a glass of wine over what is made clear to be onion soup. Presumably, the onions you’re picking are for the hotel guests? Or… something? Doesn’t matter though, the game starts again and it’s back to madly picking onions.

The key gameplay, behind all the flashing lights, is lining up the highlighted squares through your clicks so as to get the most points. You get rewarded with more time for completing a line, even more so for getting more than one line at once.

Though it’s massively simple, Million Onion Hotel manages to be rewarding enough to want to come back to, as well as providing just the right amount of lights and noises that will entertain, but not trigger, an epilepsy patient.

... as well as providing just the right amount of lights and noises that will entertain, but not trigger, an epilepsy patient.

Million Onion Hotel is not an easy game to understand, rate or even read about. What is it? An insight into the existentialism inherent in our society? A showcase of the ultimate nothingness that is the videos games industry?

Or is it just manically clicking on onions for points?

Whatever it is, Million Onion Hotel is an experiment in something. It manages to be fun whatever it is, so that’s all that really matters.